There was an official announcement today that filmmaker Roger Avary is dusting off his director’s cap after a seven-year hiatus for a new feature take on “Paradise Lost, based on the classic John Milton literary work from the 15th century (taking on Bible material by expanding upon the fall of man and Lucifer’s role in that), and will be employing the use of generative AI alongside partner Ex Machina Studios.
“‘Beowulf’ was a revisionist reimagining made on a massive budget, but with ‘Paradise Lost’ I’m taking a more faithful approach at a fraction of the cost, using cutting-edge generative AI to bring Milton’s vision to life in ways unimaginable just a few years ago,” said Avary in an official statement.
An official synopsis reads:
“Paradise Lost” is the ultimate faith-based heroic saga: a cosmic war in the heavens where the charismatic, rebellious archangel Lucifer defies God, is hurled into the abyss of Hell, and vows revenge on all creation. From the fiery lake of damnation, Lucifer rises as Satan to seduce humanity’s first parents, Adam and Eve, in the flawless Garden of Eden, triggering the Fall of Man and the loss of Paradise itself.
The irony of here using AI to develop visuals for “Paradise Lost” is that the iconic engravings and illustrations for the story by the French artist Gustave Doré are in the public domain and could be incorporated into the production design (may happen regardless of their use of AI). In the past, Aussie filmmaker Alex Proyas (“The Crow“) was developing his own take on “Paradise Lost” with Bradley Cooper recruited to play Lucifer.
Some of Avary’s credits in the past include story credit on Quentin Tarantino‘s (a longtime friend and co-host of their podcast, “The Video Archives Podcast”) “Pulp Fiction,” the heist film “Killing Zoe,” “Rules of Attraction” starring the late James Van Der Beek (based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel), and the CGI animated Old English fantasy film “Beowulf” (Ray Winstone and Angelina Jolie starred).
The veteran screenwriter and director became sort of infamous after a fatal drinking and driving crash that killed passenger Andreas Zini, which ultimately landed him in a California jail for eight months. His first film in twelve years after 2007’s “Beowulf” was the 2019 action crime pic “Lucky Day.”
Avary had once attempted to get into the video game adaptation world with a version of “Wolfenstein” in 2012 (based on the 1981 video game where you go around killing Nazis in a WWII-era castle, players would end up face monsters in subsequent installments), and sadly never made it out of the development stage, but it is getting a second life with a TV series at Amazon MGM Studios.
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